“What?” Jack asked. “What’s wrong? I mean, beyond the obvious low-fuel problem.”
Madelaine climbed out of the pilot’s seat, stalked back into the storage area and the opposite side of the empty fuel locker. She popped open an unlocked, unlabeled compartment and pulled out what looked like a white bowling bag with the words “self-adhesive bandages” printed on one side.
“I don’t get it. Do you have a giant wound I don’t know about?”
She unzipped the bag and peered inside, looking suddenly relieved.
“They didn’t get it.”
“What?”
Madelaine carefully held the bowling bag in one arm and pulled out a bauxite fuel cube hidden within.
“Awesome. How did you know to do that?” It was a fantastic hiding place, unless the fuel thieves had been wounded and looking for first aid.
Madelaine smiled. “Someone very smart taught me that any pilot worth their salt should always have an emergency reserve fuel cube that no one else knows about. This is mine.”
“Great, let’s plug it in and get going.”
“The thing is, it’s not a full cube. In fact, it’s only a little over five percent full. Four hours of fuel at best. I kept meaningto replace it with a full one, but it’s been an adventure lately and I forgot.”
“Well, you have perfect memory mastery, that’s for certain.” Jack grinned. They were saved. “And with the two hours we already have it gives us six hours of fuel. And that’s math I can get behind.”
Madelaine smiled.
She loaded the partial fuel cube into the auxiliary chamber. The ship hummed as the system accepted it.
The fuel readout on the cockpit’s dashboard display recalculated. The red numbers turned green. Green was a good color. In this case, green meant go. They now had six hours of fuel.
Jack exhaled. “That’s so much better.”
“It’s not enough to be comfortable.”
“Comfortable flew out the airlock somewhere around ‘all the reserve fuel is gone.’ But six hours gives us options.”
“Well, it gives us one option,” Madelaine said, pulling up the star map again.
The flickering point at the edge of the chart grew brighter.
Jack leaned in to read the name.
Crooked Halo Station.
“That sounds inviting,” he said. “Like a place where people sell questionable soup and ask how attached you are to your fingers.”
“It’s an old rim station. Independent.Technicallyneutral.”
“Yeah. And I sense the wordtechnicallyis doing a lot of work in that sentence,” Jack joked.
“It sits outside most trade protections. Smugglers use it. Salvagers. Rim miners. People who don’t want official records. It’s on the very edge of the explored galaxy.”
“Perfect. My favorite kind of vacation.”
Madelaine set the course. “They should have bauxite cubes.”
“Should?”
“They fuel half the mining rigs in this sector.”
